In which I compare a strategy document to an online dating profile. Free ebook, though!

If you're beady, you'll have seen on the home page a rather intriguing offer. It says:

"GET THIS FREE EBOOK!

This ebook started out as our own in-house strategic document. It describes the publishers that we know Bibliocloud can help the most. They're the publishers we most want to work with. Now we've decided to make this document freely available to our current and future customers. In the spirit of openness, we think it's useful for you to have an insight into what we're thinking, and where our energies are focussed. It's typeset with a bit more elegance, but the words are unedited from the original in-house document... no holds barred. So enjoy the read!"

Here's a bit more about how this came about.

One of my motivations in this endeavour that is Bibliocloud is to make people happy. (That includes me.) I want to work with people who will appreciate what Bibliocloud does for them. I recognise that Bibliocloud isn't for everyone. If your company is of a particular scale or structure and you've got a system you're happy with, whether that's an Excel spreadsheet, a vintage client-server installed solution, or a platform that does what you need and whose user interface doesn't make your eyeballs bleed too badly, great! Finding a way to manage your data in a way that suits you is the whole aim of the exercise, and I say congratulations for finding a solution that fits your needs, and wish you good luck with it.

I would hate it if I ever found myself talking to someone about Bibliocloud who didn't want to be talking to me about it. Thankfully, one of the funny things I've found is that I very rarely have to "pitch" the notion of Bibliocloud. I think it's because we're publishers ourselves. We've had all these various problems over the years with title management, and ONIX, and things like the real-world implications of old-fashioned publishing contracts, with their royalty rates and escalators and "5/6ths of the prevailing rate on sales over 55% discount in the first sixth months of publication" clauses. And we've struggled with interfaces between various systems and the extraordinarily bad formatting of data that came from even very large companies such as our old distributor. And we wrote the solutions in to Bibliocloud that would make them go away, one by one. It stands to reason that other publishers would find Bibliocloud helpful, too.

So we wrote this little strategy document to get clear in our minds exactly who would be happiest to find themselves talking to us, who would naturally get the most from Bibliocloud, and who we think would genuinely be keen to find out more about Bibliocloud. And then I though well, we may as well explicitly publish this. It's a bit like online dating, where you have to bite the bullet and put out in public what you're looking for in a partner. Think of this ebook as Bibliocloud's online dating profile! I'm fun and bubbly and I enjoy a night in on the sofa as much as a drink in a wine bar! And I can parse a 25mb ONIX file in 5ms and process 12 years' worth of sales data into royalty calculation batches in 30ms! We'll have a blast!

We've designed our publishing management software to be super-helpful for medium-sized teams, to solve the particular problems that come from managing too much data with too little organisation, and to focus on getting teams to the stage that they can focus on growth, not the status quo. And that's not what every publisher wants to do. So in publishing our little ebook, I hope that it will help some companies to realise that Bibliocloud is the answer to their wildest dreams. And for publishers for whom we're not a perfect fit, at least they can still enjoy my beautiful typesetting and copywriting, and hopefully it'll save them some time in figuring out what sort of publishing management software they *do* want.

Email me -- emma@bibliocloud.com -- and I'll send you the PDF, or use the download form on the home page.